The Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple

On 21 November the Church commemorates the tradition that the three-year-old Mary was brought by Joachim and Anna to the Jerusalem Temple, received by the priest, and there nourished by an angel while she dwelt in the Holy of Holies. Of all the Twelve this feast rests on the thinnest historical basis — the Protoevangelium of James alone — and it is the latest of the Marian feasts to enter the calendar; the file marks both facts plainly.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The feast and its narrative

The Entrance (Greek Eisodia tēs Theotokou, Slavonic Vvedenie) celebrates the presentation of the young Virgin in the Temple. According to the tradition, Joachim and Anna, having received their daughter by promise, fulfilled a vow by bringing her at the age of three to the Temple at Jerusalem, where she was received by the priest Zechariah, ascended the fifteen steps of the sanctuary unaided, and was led into the Holy of Holies — the innermost place, which only the High Priest might enter, and he only once a year — there to be fed by the hand of an angel until she came of age (troparion and synaxarion of the feast; The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, pp. 164–178).

[Apocryphal: the Entrance rests entirely on the *Protoevangelium of James*; there is no canonical basis whatever, and the historical arrangements of the Temple admitted no such residence of a young girl in the sanctuary. The narrative is theological iconography, not historical report.] The source is Protoevangelium of James 7–8, which describes the three-year-old set on the Temple steps, received by the priest with a blessing, and nourished by an angel (Ronald F. Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 1995, pp. 45–49; Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, Oxford, 2011, pp. 49–53). Two things must be said with equal clarity. First, the account is historically impossible on its own terms: Second-Temple Judaism knew nothing of resident child-devotees in the sanctuary, and no one, least of all a young girl, entered the Holy of Holies (see the fuller source-critical treatment in The Great Marian Feasts). Second, the Church has never celebrated the feast as a historical report. She celebrates it as a confession, in narrative form, of who Mary is: the living Temple, sanctified from her earliest childhood, prepared to become the dwelling-place of God.

The latest of the Marian feasts

Of the four Marian Great Feasts the Entrance is the last to enter the calendar. It is attested in the Christian East only from the later period: homilies survive from St Germanos I of Constantinople (patriarch 715–730) and, in the eighth century, from St Andrew of Crete and St Tarasios, and the feast’s establishment is often connected with the dedication of the “New” (Nea) church of the Theotokos at Jerusalem in 543 (ODB = The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Presentation of the Virgin”; Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God, Popular Patristics 35, SVS Press, 2008, pp. 20–29). In the West the feast never held the standing it acquired in the East: it was adopted late (in the fourteenth century at the papal court of Avignon), removed from the Roman calendar by Pope Pius V in 1568, and only restored by Sixtus V in 1585 (ODB, s.v. “Presentation of the Virgin”). Its late and uneven reception is itself a mark of its slender historical footing: unlike the Annunciation, which was universal and early, the Entrance is a feast whose spread the sources let us watch, and whose content the sources let us trace to a single apocryphon.

The theology: the living Temple

Whatever its historical difficulties, the Entrance carries a rich and precise theology, and it is on the theology that the feast’s dignity rests. Its governing idea is the reversal of Temple and dweller: the true Temple of God — the Virgin who will hold the Uncontainable in her womb — is carried into the temple made with hands, so that the old sanctuary receives the new. The troparion states it: “Today is the prelude of the good will of God, and the proclamation of the salvation of mankind. The Virgin appears in the Temple of God, and foretells Christ to all” (troparion, Tone 4; The Festal Menaion, p. 171). The Byzantine homilists press the paradox: the Holy of Holies, which held the ark of the old covenant, now receives the living Ark who will hold not the tablets of the Law but the Lawgiver himself; the shadow admits the reality that will supersede it (Germanos of Constantinople and the eighth-century homilists on the Entrance, in Cunningham, Wider than Heaven, pp. 20–29 and the translated homilies). The feast also celebrates the consecration of a life to God from earliest childhood — Mary given wholly to God at three — and so became, in monastic and lay piety alike, an icon of total dedication.

The feast’s placement is deliberate. Falling on 21 November, it opens the approach to the Nativity of Christ: within a week, the Nativity Fast begins (15 November on the Julian calendar), and the festal texts of the Entrance already begin to sound the Christmas note. In many places the katavasiai (the refrains of the canon) sung from the Entrance onward are those of the Nativity of Christ — “Christ is born, give ye glory” — so that the feast of the Virgin’s entrance into the Temple becomes the liturgical overture to the entrance of God into the world (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, 1900, on the katavasiai from 21 November; The Festal Menaion, propers). The living Temple is placed in the sanctuary precisely so that, weeks later, the One she is prepared to bear may be born.

The icon

The icon shows the small figure of Mary at the foot of the Temple steps, or ascending them, received at the top by the priest Zechariah who bends toward her with outstretched hands; Joachim and Anna stand behind, and a train of young maidens with candles accompanies her, as the Protoevangelium describes (Protoevangelium of James 7; Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982, on the Marian feast icons). In the upper corner the icon frequently shows a second, smaller image of Mary seated within the Holy of Holies, receiving bread from an angel — the two moments, entrance and nourishment, held in one frame (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons; and see The Icon of the Feast). The disproportion of the tiny child before the great sanctuary is the theology made visible: the least is the greatest, the Temple enters the temple.

See Also

References

  • The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The propers of the Entrance, pp. 164–178.)
  • Ronald F. Hock. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1995. (Protoevangelium of James 7–8.)
  • Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše. The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • Mary B. Cunningham. Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God. Popular Patristics Series 35. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2008.
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (s.v. “Presentation of the Virgin”).
  • Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982.
  • Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga (Handbook for Church Servers). 2nd ed., 1900.